Has anyone used NAKIVO Backup & Replication?

I have been using vRanger for backing up small virtualized environments. Since it now requires a full blown Windows Server license to install (would typically install on a high-end Win7 PC) and it is lacking in dumping the latest backup for each VM to a USB drive for offsite backups (have been filling in this gap with robocopy scripts which is cumbersome to monitor and manage), I have been looking for other solutions.

I need support for Exchange and SQL Server which this appears to support.

NAVIKO is extremely cheap and appears to be feature-rich, but can't find real-world experience reviews on the product.

If using NAS, how do you do that with taking offsite? Most NAS devices I have at customer sites are for multi-generation backups that stay in-place (usually like to move as far from server room as possible e.g. another building).

Could you please clarify? I am open to changing my typical method for offsite backups.

I didn't feel like buying a 2 disk nas for each day of the week to be swapped out and taken offsite daily would have been acceptable to most of my customers. I do appreciate the suggestion though.

My concern with backing VMs to cloud storage like Amazon is that I am not aware of any means to actually test (spin up) the VMs in the cloud. When I use USB for offsite, I can periodically transport to my office and restore to a test hypervisor to ensure that VMs are restorable.

Also, by the time the new vendor's phone numbers were posted, I had already moved on. I apologize for leaving the question abandoned and not properly closing it out.

You can attach a USB external disk, to NAS units, and backup to that, in fact since you question NAKIVO Backup & Replication is the ONLY BACKUP solution for VMware/Hyper-V which now installs on Western Digital and Synology NAS, so you do not need to use a spare workstation or VM, Windows license - making it a very effective backup solution.

We now have users, that use it in this way, and backup to external USB disks, connected to the NAS which does the backup, and remove them, and take them away, some even use USB connetors to individual SSDs, e.g. 256GB and take these to the bank, because they are small light.

We've bought NAKIVO Backup for backing up a single VMware server and we do this from a Synology DS415+.

It was a breeze to setup but I recommend goinn the extra mile and editing the vmx files to allow VMware CBGT to be used on VMs running on ESXi servers. Having only delta changes backed up is also a huge plus.

The best part about NAVIKO is the price couples with the server running directly off regular OTS NAS hardware. I can't recommend it enough for small installations.

Setup is easy. I bought a NAS and run the software from there. I have a second NAS off-site and installed the same package again and use the transporter on the second NAS for network acceleration. After the back-up to the local NAS it triggers the job to copy the back-ups to the off-site repository. Earlier it was a nightmare to get the back-ups off-site but this works great. Only the source ESX-hosts must be licensed so the software on the second NAS does not need extra licensing.

David Varnum recently wrote up his impressions of PRTG, based on a presentation by my colleague Christian at Tech Field Day at VMworld in Barcelona.
Thanks David, for your detailed and honest evaluation!

Teach the user how to configure vSphere clusters to support the VMware FT feature
Open vSphere Web Client: Verify vSphere HA is enabled: Verify netowrking for vMotion and FT Logging is in place or create it: Turn On FT for a virtual machine: Verify …